Conference call, January 23, 2006, 4:30 PM EST

Progress and game plan for the web site (Michelle)

Michelle pointed us to the requirements document on the wiki and raised two issues:

• the relationship between the current issue page and the main DHQ page; we discussed various ways of connecting them. We agreed that we'll experiment in the short term with having the main DHQ page include some reference to issue-specific material (whether through a truncated TOC or some other means) with a link to the current issue page; we can move to another approach later on. If there's no graceful way to reflect the current content in the main DHQ page without too much duplication, we could have a redirect that points readers to the current issue when they visit the main page. We also observed that we can publicize specific issue pages when we announce the new issue.

• support for comments. We discussed whether we want to have some registration process and/or some vetting procedure. We agreed that we wanted a registration process partly to build contacts, and to diminish random hacking. We also agreed that we did not want (initially at least) to require prior vetting of comments, which we felt would slow down the commenting process. We will experiment first with a registration process and the ability to delete comments that are inappropriate after the fact.

Milestones and action items:

• Michelle Dalmau by January 30: new mockup of wireframe
• Melissa Terras by January 30: send Michelle sample IM document for experimentation with graphics
• John Walsh by January 30: talk with Amit about support for commenting, find out what's involved
• Everyone: look at requirements document and comment on any open issues.

Progress and game plan for OpenCMS? (John W)

John W. reported that he and Michelle are comfortable with moving Michelle's designs into OpenCMS? as soon as they're ready. After that it will basically be a matter of getting XML samples, writing the XSLT stylesheets, and creating the necessary CSS.

Milestones and action items:

• Julia Flanders by January 25: contact John Unsworth concerning Amit's availability to work on commenting and other technical development in February and March
• Michelle Dalmau by February 15: finalize design
• Julia Flanders, Wendell Piez, John Melson by February 3: send Michelle encoded samples in DHQ markup
• John Walsh by February 20: implement XSLT for basic publication
• John Walsh and Amit Kumar by March 1: develop support for commenting and registration of commenters

Progress and game plan for metadata (John W, Wendell)

John and Wendell reported that the DHQ metadata scheme has been reviewed and approved by people we trust, and it is basically solid and ready for use. We will export the metadata via a transform and load it into a database through which it can be exposed to OAI harvesters; we may be able to do this on the NORA server, or if not then at Indiana; Brown can serve as a fallback. We also agreed that it would be a good idea to register PURLs for all DHQ articles; even though this is not strictly necessary, it will provide an added measure of security.

We also discussed topic keywords and agreed that we should begin work on developing or adapting a list for this, but that we did not need to have it ready for the first issue. We considered using the DH2006 conference as an opportunity to get community input on keywords. (Another idea after the call: provide a suggestion box at the poster session...)

Milestones and action items:

• John Walsh by February 1: talk with Amit about putting an OAI data provider on the NORA server
• John Walsh and Amit Kumar by March 1: implement OAI harvesting and PURLs procedure
• Melissa Terras by February 1: talk with Alistair Dunning and HUMBUL about keywords

Schema development progress and issues (Wendell)

Wendell reported that the DHQ authoring schema is solid and usable, though it still needs further testing. The process of developing the publishing schema will essentially be to try using the authoring schema and modify it where necessary to support our publication needs.

Milestones and action items:

• Julia Flanders, Wendell Piez, and John Melson (and anyone else) by February 3 and continuing thereafter: encode sample documents using DHQ schema
• Wendell Piez by March 1: work with Michelle and John W. to identify additional refinements to schema for publication purposes
• Julia Flanders, Wendell Piez, Syd Bauman by April 15: develop an initial TEI expression of the DHQ authoring schema, and report on areas of difference and friction
• Julia Flanders and Wendell Piez over the summer: begin work on the "crayon box" schema

Identify other tasks/areas in preparation for launch

We also discussed the issue of blogging software which Stefan had raised with John Walsh. John will follow up with Stefan and Amit concerning installation of blog software on the NORA server or at Indiana.

We agreed that we need to reissue the call for reviewers and the call for papers, and in doing so make sure that we reach a broad audience, not only the humanities computing community.

Action items:

• Julia Flanders by February 1: repost call for reviewers, call for submissions
• others by February 1: circulate calls to other venues

-- JuliaFlanders - 23 Jan 2006